After working with all kinds of different CMS‘s from around the web, I’ve come to the conclusion that building larger, content heavy sites with WordPress Child Themes is my favorite way to achieve just about any results I want.

Child Themes give you stunning control over the look, feel, and layout of your website (I’ve written a great introduction to child themes here) by giving you access to the underlying files that make up your website.

From changing the styles of your site to interacting with under-the-hood components to completely overriding page templates, I want to warm you up to the spectrum of possibilities that can be unlocked through this simple customization process.

Let’s look at 5 quick things you can do to customize your WordPress website with the MD Child Theme.

Already an MD customer? Download the special MD Child Theme from your account to get a jumpstart as well as some preinstalled code snippets.

1) Add Colored Badges Around Your Site With a Simple CSS Style Easy

See that small badge at the end of the headline? These badges are my favorite little design element to add into my Child Themes because of how useful and accessible they are.

You can place a badge like this anywhere that accepts HTML (like in the post editor, widget area, or menu item for example) and make the text say anything you want.

To implement badges into your own site, simply paste this small bit of CSS into your Child Theme’s style.css file:

This code will add a new menu item to the end of your header with a custom CSS class you can use to further style the phone number. Maybe you’d want to add a custom background color like Eco Pest Control did to their design:

3) Create a Speech Bubble Blockquote

Social proof is a great persuasion tool when used in your copy. To make testimonials and quotes look a little more authentic, it’s worth some extra styling to make them stand out. This speech bubble seems to agree:

MD style the blockquote by default, and you can customize it further by adding a cool speech bubble style right to your Child Theme’s style.css file! — Alex Mangini, MD founder

To mimic this style for yourself, paste the following into your stylesheet:

tip: remove the .bubble selector to make all blockquotes bubbles by default.

One of the first things I do when setting up a new Child Theme is add the following scripts into my functions.php file (or somewhere else). These scripts are meant for improving the utility of WordPress, such as getting better performance out of your site. Let’s break them down:

4a) Remove WordPress Emoji Code

If you look in your sites source code, you may see an ugly JavaScript code towards the top that enables Emjoi support to your site. If you’re like me and don’t think the script is worth loading on your site, you can remove it with these simple actions:

4c) Make Shortcodes Work in Text Widgets

By default, WordPress disables shortcodes from being used in Widgets. If you’re using a plugin like MD Popups and wanted to place a popup trigger in you’re sidebar, you’ll need to first enable the use of shortcodes in widget areas by placing this simple filter in your functions.php file:

We can debate all day about whether you should add your Favicon and Tracking Scripts into your Child Theme, and while there are plugins that let you do these things, I change them so little that I’d rather not have to see them in my WordPress interface.

Plus it’s surprisingly easy to add a Favicon to your Child theme. All it takes is a single line of HTML to hook into wp_head. Make sure you have the correct path to your Favicon image as well:

Now when it comes to adding scripts to your site such as a Google Analytics Tracking code, you may want to consider placing them at the bottom of your site’s footer. The less scripts you load at the top of the page, the quicker your actual content will load.

Here’s how you can hook a tracking script like Google Analytics to your site’s footer with the wp_footer hook (you have to get the script from your provider then paste it in:

That’s a Good Start—What will you do next?

Child Themes can single-handedly unlock the true power of your website and if you know what you’re doing, you’ll be able to make some big changes in record time.

My goal with this article was to give you some easy snippets of code you can paste into your Child Theme to get instant results as well as familiarize you with working inside the Child Theme environment.

I’m going to be writing a lot more about Child Themes on the blog and I’d love to hear from you about your biggest struggles using them. Leave a comment below and tell me what you’d like to learn and I’ll do my best to incorporate it into a tutorial everybody can learn from.